Our Father in Heaven

Jesus taught His disciples to address God as He did: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name” (Matt. 6:9). Today, Sinclair Ferguson reflects on the Lord’s Prayer and the precious gift we have in calling on God as Father.

I thought at some stage this year in Things Unseen, we ought to spend a week at least thinking about the Lord’s Prayer—and this is that week. I know it’s just possible that your immediate reaction might be, “Oh no, not the Lord’s Prayer again,” and I understand that. Many of us say it every week in church, some of us maybe say it privately every day since we are supposed to pray for our daily bread. From that point of view, we might feel that we are very familiar with the Lord’s Prayer. I don’t expect that I’ll say anything that’s new or fresh or especially insightful this week, but the Lord’s Prayer is very, very fundamental to our Christian life because it’s not only a prayer, but it’s actually a prayer that reflects a very basic guide to living the Christian life.

But before we get into it, maybe I should try and clear up a misunderstanding. People sometimes say we shouldn’t use these words because it’s insincere to use someone else’s words when you pray. But that’s kind of odd, isn’t it? Don’t we sing someone else’s words in church, and don’t the songs that we sing—even if we are in a church that sings only Psalms—don’t the songs that we sing reflect the words of the Lord’s Prayer in different ways?

I remember someone complaining to me about the introduction of a confession of sin into the liturgy of worship because they said it isn’t sincere to confess your sins using someone else’s words. And yet, I knew the same person heartily and cheerfully sung Toplady’s hymn “Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me, Let Me Hide Myself in Thee” and each time would sing, “Foul and full of sin I am,” and confess their sins in someone else’s words. So, it’s appropriate that we use someone else’s words, especially when they’re the words the Lord Jesus taught us.

Well, you know how the prayer begins with an address to God: “Our Father in Heaven, may Your name be hallowed” or “sanctified.” It’s a wonderful reminder that when we pray to the God who made the cosmos, we’re invited to call Him our Father. Believers are His children. We belong to His family. We’re His and we’re not on our own. And yet at the same time, it is a marvelous reminder to us that He’s far above us. He’s in Heaven. So, our first petition is a prayer that His name will be kept holy: “Hallowed be Your name.” Jesus was teaching His disciples here to pray the way He did.

If you remember at the high point of the gospel story, a point of profound emotion, Jesus addresses God in John 17:11 as “holy Father.” When He teaches us the Lord’s Prayer, as we call it, it is, first of all, bringing us into the presence of the great, majestic Creator and encouraging us to speak to Him. When we realize who God is, we instinctively feel: “How can I speak to Him? I don’t even know how to address Him, what to call Him, what to pray.” Jesus is saying to us, “My child, say what I say and call Him what I call Him.” So, in the lovely words of the old liturgy attributed to John Chrysostom, “We dare to call upon the heavenly God as Father and say, ‘Our Father who art in heaven.’”

That single word Father is one of the most cherished words in the gospel. But what do you do if the word Father is a problem for you—a word that causes pain to you for whatever reason, or perhaps even embarrassment, or just leaves you cold because of the kind of father you had perhaps, or maybe the father you didn’t have?

Well, first of all, you need to remember you’re not praying to your father. And remember, too, that we’re not to think that God is just like the earthly father we had, only more so. So now, the way to think about God as Father is remembering that He was and is the Father of the Lord Jesus. You’re being invited to know that Father.

Remember what He said when Philip asked Him, John 14:8, “Show us the Father, Jesus, and that will be enough for us.” And Jesus said, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” Like Father, like Son. There’s nothing un-Jesus-like in the Father. So how good and kind, then, must this Father be?

So you see, as Jesus is teaching us how to pray, He’s also teaching us how to live. He’s telling us, first of all, to speak to our Father the way He Himself did—to call upon Him as our holy Father.

I think the great seventeenth-century pastor-theologian John Owen puts it beautifully. He says, “If the love of a father will not make a child delight in him, what will?” So, let’s take to heart the words of Matthew 6:9: “Pray then like this: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.’”

Well, more on the Lord’s prayer tomorrow, and I hope you’ll join us then on Things Unseen.